SNW showed that there are three flash storage plays emerging: flash in the shelf, flash in the controller and flash in the server. Only 3PAR out of the top 12 or so storage vendors does not have a flash strategy.
EMC started the flash storage ball rolling by announcing its Enterprise Flash Drives for Symmetrix in January this …

COMMENTS

Silly State Disk

SSD is the latest marketing initiative from all storage vendors. The reality is that SSD economics don't stack up yet. Until we have SSD that is comparable in capacity and lifespan to current drive technology, and at an acceptable price premium, only a small number of customers will see benefits from using them.

The biggest push is from the conventional array vendors that are spindle bound for performance. Virtualised arrays use disk more efficiently and don't need to rush into SSD to improve figures. It is currently far better and cheaper to throw hundreds of conventional disks into an array than sell a kidney for fewer low-capacity SSD's. Dogbert would be pleased.

Stand Still Dork

Warning: Do not run out and spend a ton of money on a flash drive, unless you really want to waste your money.

There is something much better that is poking it's head over the horizon. FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) is becoming something that is worth waiting for. Write speeds are fast and there is none of that block erase or low re-write count, so there is also no block management to worry about either.

The only problems right now is the storage density is very low and the cost is high. This is to be expected of new technologies and it will change. But I think if you are wanting something to speed up your system then this would be an order of magnitude faster and it won't wear out by the time you are showing it off to your boss.

Solid State Discourse

SSD good for cache

While I do admit that SSD has helped a lot in having big storage capacities in small mediums (there are microSD cards with more capacity than my 1998 laptop's HDD!), I don't think SSD is reliable enough to serve as an outright replacement of the spindle-HDD. I've had weird stuff happen with SSD from time to time; I once had one mp3 file "fusing" with another one for reasons unknown.

However, using SSD as cache for large storage appliances sounds good, as it has fast read access compared with spindle-drives. But SSD as main storage is currently only needed in the small device market.

SSDs are okay

Let's see if the storage customers start buying these things. If so, they must be worth it. ;-)

I've been using an SSD in my laptop for 6 months now and that's where I really think the SSD benefits are: No noise, a little lower power consumption, random read speeds out of this world. And who needs write speeds anyway? :-)